Digital and Analog Photography

Negative Feelings

Take a print in your hands. A traditional print. Yes, it can be hold, it can be touched, it can be smelled, it can be felt.

This essay themasised the uniqueness of the physical process as well as the thought process of analogue photography.

As Henri Cartier Bresson wrote nicely about the decisive moment "To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.".This moment you are waiting for it is just a fraction of a second, before you press the shutter, you make a personal connection with the scene, and wait for the right moment to shoot. But this right moment, this 125 of a second we are blind, the image exists just in our imagination, as a result to the connection we made before we decided to press the shutter. But the real image, is not there, you have not seen it. It is in captured in the camera, and comes out just after processing the film. You may see your decision 1 hour after the photo was taken or 1 year after the photo was taken.

Buy a film, load the camera shoot it, process it. Why do so many people still bother with the process of analog photography? In the age of digital photography, we get more and more confronted with the words easy,fast and cheap.

Now days we are, as a Black and White photographer, always forced, to stand up for, why we „still“ shoot photographs analogue- which the audience indeed associate with slowness, expensive and complicated. For our time it is perhaps characteristic, that the powerful advertising industries can create such conceptual association, without making the affected people question, if...

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...eeps time.

The tip of the pencil meets the paper. The result of an direct impulse, like the light exposes a negative through the diaphragm and fixes what´s in focus.

Digitally delayed time can not keep up with the momentum of what is seen.

It produces a hybrid moment, it leads to a thought image, which is contrary to the gazed-upon and observed one.

In an analogue image the seen is self-evidently coungruent with ones own inner eye.“

-Lothar Baumgarten

Considering all this stages in picture making, every time you press the shutter, it becomes something personal, magical. All the power is given, to be able to absorb and construct at the same time.

You can take a photograph in your hands, swipe gently with a finger over the surface and feel the texture of the paper.

You can hang a photograph on the wall or hide it in a drawer.